The firm of A. Dewar Rattray was originally founded in 1868 near Partick Cross on Glasgow’s Dumbarton Road by the eponymous Andrew Dewar Rattray as a merchant grocer and spirits retailer. By the early 1900s the A.D. Rattray business had a flourishing whisky broking and wholesale network distributing Highland malts including Stronachie.

Andrew Dewar Rattray died in 1910 and in 1938 the A.D. Rattray business was sold to fellow whisky brokers William Walker Co. In 1939 William Walker’s daughter Elizabeth married his former apprentice Stanley P. Morrison, who had joined William Walker in the 1920s before starting his own company in 1935. Morrison went on to become a hugely influential dealmaker, buying and selling Chivas Brothers in the 1930s and 1940s with another former partner, Robert Lundie, before acquiring Bowmore distillery in 1963 and Glen Garioch in 1970. 

Stanley P. Morrison died in 1971, leaving sons William Brian Morrison and Stanley Walker Morrison (aka Tim Morrison) in charge of his firm. The A.D. Rattray company had been inherited by William Walker’s elder daughter Williamina Bruce (the sister of Stanley P. Morrison’s wife Elizabeth) in the late 1940s, and had continued as a whisky wholesaler and cask broker.

By the 1980s, however, A.D. Rattray had become largely dormant and the company was acquired by Tim Morrison from his aunt Williamina Bruce in 1993, the year before he and the rest of the Morrison family sold their interest in Morrison Bowmore Distillers to the Japanese drinks firm Suntory, who had owned a 35% stake since 1987.

In 2002, the Morrisons revived the Stronachie name, issuing a new Stronachie branded single malt whisky through their A.D. Rattray company. The original Stronachie Highland single malt whisky had once been distributed by Andrew Dewar Rattray himself, but the distillery had closed in 1928; the new Stronachie from Rattray was a sourced malt from Benrinnes and today is a well-established brand. 

A.D. Rattray subsequently began independently bottling single malt Scotch whisky in 2004, with the vast majority of their releases being single cask single malt whiskies bottled at full cask strength. The company also has a Cask Islay brand for anonymous Islay single malts bottled at 46%. In 2017 Tim Morrison founded the Clydeside distillery in Glasgow, which released its inaugural single malt in 2021.